It is May, 1979. I'm less than a month away from graduating. While visiting with faculty member Margaret Gribskov, she asks me, "So what are you going to do after you get that degree?"

It was the first time in my entire Evergreen career anyone had ever posed that question.

I'm sure I'm not the only 1970s TESC grad to be asked this question over and over: "Did you know Matt Groaning?" No. But I knew a great guy named Matt Groening (rhymes with "raining"). Here is my collage of Matt memories ...

--He was one of the very first people I met at TESC after I enrolled. We were neighbors in A Dorm. Before I met him, I noticed the stairway walls were covered with variations on the "happy face" icon (e.g. Thalidomide Happy Face) and I soon discovered the author of this grafitti was Matt. Right away we established that we were both life-long cartoonists with many of the same influences. However, he had one up on me. He was the son of a cartoonist, named Homer Groening.

More on the flip...

Bits of memory quilted together regarding Lynda Barry:

--We met in fall quarter 1974. Lynda's original goal was to be an art teacher.

--Once, when walking from the dorms to main campus, she spied a dadaist approaching us. Lynda grabbed me and forced us to hide behind a corner. "That man hates everything beautiful about art!" she spat.

--She had some sort of weird power over Matt Groening when he was CPJ editor. Once I witnessed her making a grand entrance into the paper's office and ordering Matt, "I want my picture on the cover of this issue!" And by God, he did it. I swear her photo was in every other issue of that era.

More on the flip...

One of the real pleasures of attending the blogger's conference over the weekend was sitting next to Dave Neiwert, and learning about his blog, Orcinus (pronounced orSInus). It was my duty, and distinct honor, to introduce Dave at the conference, and I am equally pleased to be able to introduce him to Olybloggers. Dave's background is in newspaper reporting, and he also worked at MSNBC. More recently, he is the author of several books, including his most recent, Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community. His calling, it appears, is to expose, examine, and repudiate right-wing extremism in its several forms. His writing is clear, well-thought out, and effective. For example, he encapsulates an argument about what is wrong with the MSM in the following exerpt from a recent post (discussing comments of a journalist from the Boston Globe named Young):

For the bulk of my journalistic career, I probably saw the world in terms similar to Young's: the left and right, both for their virtues and their flaws, tended to balance each other out. For every bit of ugliness on the right, you could often find a counterpart on the left. This leaves those of us in the middle to balance things out. I think this view dominated in most of the newsrooms where I worked as well.

But I also studied logic and ethics back in the day (philosophy was a second major) and after awhile came to see that what many of us were doing in "balancing" our stories was in fact the antithesis of seeking out the truth, which is what journalism is supposed to be about. Specifically, many of us -- not just journalists -- were indulging in a classic logical fallacy, namely, the "false middle," or the argumentum ad temperantiam: "If two groups are locked in argument, one maintaining that 2+2=4, and the other claiming that 2+2=6, sure enough, an Englishman will walk in and settle on 2+2=5, denouncing both groups as extremists."

I don't know if the balance that I used to see ever existed. But in the 1990s, when it became clear that a lot of people on the right were declaring that 2+2=6, and a lot of people in the media were reporting their claims without batting an eye, any balance I had seen before began to vanish -- and it has not returned.

For Young to suggest that the vicious rhetoric that sprung from the right during those years had any kind of counterpart on the left is simply absurd. While we were being regularly regaled with Vince Foster and Mena Airport and Black Love Child conspiracy theories from mainstream right-wing pundits ranging from the Wall Street Journal to Rush Limbaugh to Fox News, as well as assassination talk from the likes of Ann Coulter, there simply was no counterpart for this kind of talk on the left during those years. The left, indeed, remained remarkably subdued during the Clinton years, except for those more liberal than Clinton who criticized him for being too conservative.

I kick myself for not having found my way to his blog before now, and I hope that Olybloggers will click their way over and check it out; it is well worth the effort.

WASHINGTON — Some U.S. jobs pay living wages, are in fast-growing fields, have lots of openings and don't require bachelor's degrees.

Most of them aren't glamorous, but they won't be offshored anytime soon either, according to a newly published analysis by the nonprofit agency Jobs for the Future.

Among them: truck and bus driving, nursing, construction and computer-tech jobs.

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